The intra-GOP debate over the Iran war has now reached inside the Trump administration, triggering the first senior-level resignation over the conflict.
Joe Kent, a former U.S. Army officer, resigned Tuesday from his position as the director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), saying in a letter that he could no longer “in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran.” Kent focused his blame on “high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media” for leading President Donald Trump down this dangerous path and deceiving him into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat and that a war could be won quickly and easily.
“I support the values and the foreign policies that you campaigned on in 2016, 2020, 2024, which you enacted in your first term,” Kent wrote to Trump in his resignation letter. “Until June of 2025, you understood that the wars in the Middle East were a trap that robbed America of the precious lives of our patriots and depleted the wealth and prosperity of our nation.”
Kent, who served eleven combat tours, primarily in Iraq, between 1998 and 2018, lost his first wife, herself a servicemember with the Navy, in a suicide bombing in Syria in 2019, when their children were one and three years old. “I wouldn’t say necessarily Shannon getting killed changed my mind. It solidified some things,’” he said in a 2021 video for Concerned Veterans for America. “Why are there young men, young women in Afghanistan right now, in Syria right now, in Iraq right now? What are they doing?”
Kent highlighted his military experience in his letter.
“I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives,” he wrote.
Kent was the Republican nominee for a House seat in Washington in 2022 and 2024, but he lost two close elections. During his campaign, Kent was characterized as one of a growing number of veterans who, disillusioned by their experiences, had become right-wing war skeptics.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), in which NCTC is housed, has been a home for previous critics of long-term American military entanglements abroad, including Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Will Ruger, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration.
On Monday, the New York Times reported that Dan Caldwell, a former Pentagon official who was accused and then cleared of leaking classified information, had been hired for a role at ODNI.
